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Good writing is always new.

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Writing
Good
Always

More quotes by A. S. Byatt

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Lists are a form of power.
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Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction.
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There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board.
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I was no good at being a child.
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I don't see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
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Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
A. S. Byatt
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Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.
A. S. Byatt
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I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.
A. S. Byatt
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She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.
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In my mind's eye Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.
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Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
A. S. Byatt
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Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.
A. S. Byatt
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One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
A. S. Byatt
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
A. S. Byatt
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Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.
A. S. Byatt
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The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.
A. S. Byatt
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
A. S. Byatt
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When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
A. S. Byatt
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
A. S. Byatt
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Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.
A. S. Byatt